Anne Bancroft exits life's stage

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Oscar and Tony Award winner Anne Bancroft, the seductive Mrs
Robinson in the 1967 film The Graduate, has died.

Bancroft, 73, died of uterine cancer on Monday in Manhattan, a
spokesman for her husband, writer-director-comedian Mel Brooks,
said.

Throughout a career that spanned almost 50 years, Bancroft won
respect as one of the most versatile and resourceful actors of her
generation.

She won an Oscar in 1962 for her portrayal of a sight-impaired
teacher in The Miracle Worker.

As the malevolent seductress Mrs Robinson, Bancroft blended
sensuality with an undercurrent of desperate pathos. She helped
propel Dustin Hoffman, as her young preppie prey, to major stardom
and Mike Nichols' black comedy to classic status.

Bancroft seemed baffled by the sustained attention her role in
The Graduate drew through the decades relative to her
other roles.

"I am quite surprised that with all my work, and some of it is
very, very good, that nobody talks about The Miracle
Worker," she said in 2003.

"We're talking about Mrs Robinson. I understand the world. I'm
just a little dismayed that people aren't beyond it yet."

She excelled in both drama and comedy. Her resume was testament
to a spirited talent that was up for anything, whether it was
playing Israeli prime minister Golda Meir on stage, camping up in
her husband's wacky comedies, including Silent Movie
(1976) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1996), or
providing the voice of insect royalty in the digitally animated
comedy Antz in 1998.

With her dark, sultry beauty, the young woman born Anna Maria
Louise Italiano in the Bronx seemed destined for a glamorous Tinsel
Town niche. Her first movie role was second banana to Marilyn
Monroe in the comedy Don't Bother to Knock (1952).

After a string of ingenue parts in movies, she enjoyed her first
stage coup in 1958 in a Tony-winning role opposite Henry Fonda in
Two for the Seesaw. She won another Tony two years later
for her performance in The Miracle Worker as Annie
Sullivan, the mercurial passionate woman hired by Helen Keller's
family to teach their deaf and blind daughter, played on stage and
screen by Patty Duke.

The play's popular, critically acclaimed transformation into a
movie signalled a triumphant jump-start to Bancroft's film
career.

Bancroft was nominated four other times for Academy Awards:
The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967),
The Turning Point (1977) and Agnes of God
(1985).

In 1964, she married Brooks, whom she met when he attended a
taping of a Perry Como TV special in which she was singing and
dancing.